UCLA Receives $10 Million Gift to Produce Left-Wing Films

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) film school has received a $10 million gift from Former EBay Inc. President Jeff Skoll to launch the Skoll Center for Social Impact Entertainment, “dedicated to promoting social change through entertainment and performing arts.” The Skoll Center will work with Skoll’s Participant Media, which produced Al Gore’s Oscar-winning climate change agitprop film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

According to a press release, the Skoll Center will aim to “engage the public in meaningful debate around society’s most pressing problems and the important role entertainment and performing arts plays in this conversation.” The film school’s dean, Teri Schwartz, quoted in the release, said that the Skoll Center would help UCLA “to re-imagine entertainment and performing arts education as an interdisciplinary enterprise grounded in humanistic storytelling, social responsibility, global diversity and technology and innovation.”

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She added that the Skoll Center would use “the power of story and research to inspire and galvanize social change.” The center will evidently aim to coordinate activism among groups the press release refers to as “foundations, social entrepreneurs, non-profits, philanthropists, corporations, and the creative community.”

Though Participant Media has a distinct left-wing orientation, it has produced some films that target Democratic Party interest groups, such as 2010’s highly acclaimed Waiting for ‘Superman’, a documentary that addresses the role that teachers unions play in stifling educational innovation and charter schools for the neediest students.

UCLA is a partially taxpayer-funded, tax-exempt, non-profit public university.